Below are concise, high-level articles outlining two of the core
problem spaces that Berenguer Aerospace Group is focused on:
the risks posed by lunar dust, and the challenge of maintaining
cryogenic propellant stability across long-duration missions.
Lunar Dust: A Silent but Persistent Operational Hazard
Lunar Surface Operations • Risk Mitigation
Lunar dust is not simply “dust.” It is a mechanically sharp,
electrostatically active regolith composed of microscopic glassy
fragments formed over billions of years of micrometeoroid impacts.
In a vacuum, without the smoothing effect of wind or water, these
particles remain jagged and abrasive, capable of infiltrating and
degrading almost every exposed system over time.
Historical missions have already shown how pervasive this material
can be. Dust can adhere to suits, seals, thermal radiators, solar
arrays, mechanisms, and optical systems. Over repeated sorties or
long surface stays, it can erode protective coatings, compromise
seals and hatch integrity, reduce thermal performance, and affect
the precision of instruments and sensors. For long-duration
outposts, this is not a minor inconvenience — it is a cumulative,
mission-scale risk.
There is also an electrostatic dimension. Near local sunrise and
sunset on the Moon, electric fields can loft fine particles above
the surface, creating subtle dust motion and horizon glow. This
means that dust can migrate and settle in unexpected locations,
including sensitive hardware that was not originally considered at
high risk.
At Berenguer Aerospace Group, we are interested in how intelligent
systems can support lunar dust mitigation. That includes modeling
dust exposure across different mission phases, identifying patterns
in sensor behavior that may indicate early dust-related degradation,
and exploring strategies for procedural and software-assisted
“dust-aware” operations. The goal is not to solve dust in isolation,
but to embed dust awareness into the broader fabric of lunar
logistics, maintenance, and infrastructure planning.
Cryogenic Propellant Stability in Deep Space: A Quiet Challenge Beneath the Ambition
Thermal Management • Long-Duration Storage
Cryogenic propellants — liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, liquid methane — are the quiet enablers behind
every high-energy mission humanity has ever attempted. They sit inside tanks at the edge of physics:
ultra-cold, highly volatile, and exquisitely sensitive to small thermal shifts. For lunar logistics,
crewed exploration, orbital depots, and the emerging vision of large space-based compute platforms,
long-duration cryogenic stability is not a supporting detail. It is the architecture’s foundation.
Yet the true difficulty of maintaining stable cryogenic conditions is easy to underestimate. Many of the most
consequential risks do not emerge as dramatic alarms. They begin as silent gradients — a few degrees
here, a thin vapor layer there, a slow drift in pressure that only becomes meaningful hours later.
Cryogenic instability is an accumulation of small effects, not a single event.
This is where intelligent oversight matters. At Berenguer Aerospace Group, we explore these subtle patterns —
not the spectacular failures, but the quiet precursors that lead to them.
1. The Hidden Thermal Dynamics Inside Cryogenic Stages
Cryogenic propellants live in a world where small thermal variations can have large operational consequences.
Inside a tank, there is no simple “cold” or “hot.” Instead, there is a shifting, evolving structure of
temperatures, vapor layers, and micro-flows.
Stratification & micro-layering
Even slight differences in temperature can create stratified layers of different density. These layers
determine how propellant moves, how it settles, and whether an engine can reliably restart after a long coast.
A tank that looks calm on telemetry may be internally complex — and complexity without visibility becomes risk.
Boil-off, vapor formation & pressure drift
As the tank slowly absorbs heat from the environment, vapor forms. Pressure rises. Operators must choose
between venting precious delta-v or relying on active cooling, mixers, or cryocoolers — each adding mass,
power demand, or time penalties. The real hazard is not rapid boil-off. It is the small, slow, cumulative
drift in thermal conditions that changes behavior over hours, not seconds.
Long-coast, multi-burn missions
Modern high-energy missions require upper stages to coast for extended periods, reorient, re-ignite, and
deliver payloads to orbits that stretch the limits of precision. During these long phases, tanks experience
repeated sunlight exposure, deep cold in eclipse, slow wall heating, subtle vapor growth, and settling and
un-settling cycles. A few degrees’ drift, accumulated quietly, can determine the success of a re-ignition.
Stratification as a quiet architecture risk.
Even when pressure and temperature appear nominal at the tank level, internal layering can change how
propellant behaves during maneuvers, chill-down, and engine restart. Intelligent oversight is about
seeing these emerging patterns before they matter.
2. A Recent Case Study: Starship Booster 18
In late 2025, SpaceX’s Starship Booster 18 suffered a catastrophic rupture during a cryogenic proof test in
Texas. No engines were firing. It was a pressurization test — a procedure that appears almost routine.
Yet the booster failed violently.
This event underscores a truth aerospace engineers have known for decades: cryogenic systems do not need
combustion to become dangerous. They only need pressure, temperature, and time. Likely contributors include
chill-down stresses, uneven wall temperatures, pressurization gas behavior, and localized thermal-structural
mismatch — none of which are spectacular on their own, but together, under the right conditions, become the
catalyst for a major structural event.
It is exactly the kind of scenario where intelligent oversight — a layer that understands evolving thermal
risk — becomes invaluable.
3. When Data Centers Move to Orbit, Thermal Physics Follows
As companies envision multi-gigawatt compute platforms in orbit, powered by large solar wings and cooled by
radiators the size of city blocks, one principle remains unchanged: in space, all heat must be managed.
None of it disappears.
Radiator scale & sensitivity
Cooling high-performance GPUs in vacuum requires enormous radiators, kept clean, cold, and carefully oriented.
A thin film of contamination can alter emissivity enough to shift equilibrium temperature by tens of degrees —
silently derating compute capability.
Thermal cycling & structural warping
Large platforms face continuous temperature gradients between illuminated and shadowed regions. Over years,
these gradients induce bending, twisting, stress accumulation, and alignment drift. An architecture may be
structurally sound but thermally unstable.
Local hot spots inside the rack
A single high-performance GPU can dissipate hundreds of watts. Clusters generate hot spots that must travel
through cold plates, fluid loops, shielding, and radiators. Each interface is a potential bottleneck — and
in vacuum, every bottleneck matters.
Radiation & thermal interplay
Radiation can create sudden, localized heating inside chips. Shielding traps heat. Slower rad-hardened
chips produce less heat but require more area. It is a delicate thermal ecosystem with no room for surprises.
4. Where Intelligent Oversight Changes the Picture
Across rockets, lunar missions, cryogenic depots, and future orbital compute systems, the patterns are the same:
temperature gradients begin quietly, small deviations compound, telemetry rarely shows the earliest risks,
and operators often see the problem only when it is already significant.
This is where a concept like thermal triage and allocation becomes powerful. An intelligent system
can track subtle, evolving temperature fields, identify asymmetries developing over time, interpret sensor
behavior in context, map where risk is accumulating, and advise on targeted allocation of cooling, maneuvers,
or procedural changes.
Conclusion
Cryogenic propellants and high-power space systems share a common thread: they operate at the boundary
between stability and drift, where small thermal shifts can reshape mission outcomes. The path to sustainable
lunar logistics, reusable launch architectures, and orbital data centers depends on a more refined understanding
of these quiet thermal dynamics.
At Berenguer Aerospace Group, we focus precisely on this frontier — the elegant, hidden physics that sit behind
mission reliability, and the intelligent systems that help operators stay one step ahead.
